Invisible Links eBook

Petter Nord sat up in bed. He looked all of a
sudden pitifully weak and small. His tears were
streaming. He wailed aloud.

“Uncle,” said Edith, “he is weeping.”

“Let him weep,” said Halfvorson, “let
him weep!” And he walked forward and looked
at the boy. “You can weep all you like,”
he said, “but that does not take me in.”

“Oh, oh,” cried Petter Nord, “I
am no thief. I hid the note as a joke—­to
make you angry. I wanted to pay you back for the
mice. I am not a thief. Will no one listen
to me. I am not a thief.”

“Uncle,” said Edith, “if you have
tortured him enough now, perhaps we may go back to
bed?”

“I know, of course, that it sounds terrible,”
said Halfvorson, “but it cannot be helped.”
He was gay, in very high spirits. “I have
had my eye on you for a long time,” he said
to the boy. “You have always something
you are tucking away when I come into the shop.
But now I have caught you. Now I leave witnesses,
and now I am going for the police.”

The boy gave a piercing scream. “Will no
one help me, will no one help me?” he cried.
Halfvorson was gone, and the old woman who managed
his house came up to him.

“Get up and dress yourself, Petter Nord!
Halforson has gone for the police, and while he is
away you can escape. The young lady can go out
into the kitchen and get you a little food. I
will pack your things.”

The terrible weeping instantly ceased. After
a short tine of hurry the boy was ready. He kissed
both the women on the hand, humbly, like a whipped
dog. And then off he ran.

They stood in the door and looked after him.
When he was gone, they drew a sigh of relief.

“What will Halfvorson say?” said Edith.

“He will be glad,” answered the housekeeper.

“He put the money there for the boy, I think.
I guess that he wanted to be rid of him.”

“But why? The boy was the best one we have
had in the shop for many years.”

“He probably did not want him to give testimony
in the affair with the brandy.”

Edith stood silent and breathed quickly. “It
is so base, so base,” she murmured. She
clenched her fist towards the office and towards the
little pane in the door, through which Halfvorson could
see into the shop. She would have liked, she
too, to have fled out into the world, away from all
this meanness. She heard a sound far in, in the
shop. She listened, went nearer, followed the
noise, and at last found behind a keg of herring the
cage of Petter Nord’s white mice.

She took it up, put it on the counter, and opened
the cage door. Mouse after mouse scampered out
and disappeared behind boxes and barrels.

“May you flourish and increase,” said
Edith. “May you do injury and revenge your
master!”

II

The little town lay friendly and contented under its
red hill. It was so embedded in green that the
church tower only just stuck up out of it. Garden
after garden crowded one another on narrow terraces
up the slope, and when they could go no further in
that direction, they leaped with their bushes and
trees across the street and spread themselves out
between the scattered farmhouses and on the narrow
strips of earth about them, until they were stopped
by the broad river.